June 2nd, 2011

A few weeks ago, I received my free BlackBerry PlayBook from RIM. After playing around with it, I realized there wasn’t a built-in file browsing app nor was there an app on the AppWorld that allowed the user to browse the full QNX file system. I then spent a couple of days coding one of my own. It wasn’t a full blown file management app – it allowed file/folder browsing and deleting files (pretty much all that I needed for personal use). I named it File Browser and put it up on BlackBerry AppWorld so others can benefit from this. To my surprise, in a matter of hours after it published, it became #1 in the top purchased app for PlayBook and #3 in the top purchased app in the whole of AppWorld (PlayBook and BlackBerry smartphones combined). The feedback I got for this app was very supportive and so constructive that I decided to continue the development on it and so far it has evolved into a full blown file management app with support for packaging and unzipping ZIP archive files. I am currently working on integrating FTP support for it. I will keep updating it as I get time to work on it. Since its initial launch, there have been many other apps following the footsteps of File Browser that give the user unique ways of interacting with the QNX file system and I believe overall experience people have with the PlayBook device has been greatly enhanced because of this.